Eclectic and striving never to follow paths into ruts, the OF Blog focuses on essays, reviews, interviews, and other odds and ends that might be of interest to fans of both literary and speculative fiction. Now with a cute owl for your enjoyment.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

The more I read and re-read Borges' poetry, the more appreciative I've become of them, both from a stylistic and thematic viewpoint. There is nothing flashy or avant-garde about Borges' poems, as they usually stick to a sonnet or strictly metred verse. But yet within these familiar patterns, stories begin to develop. In his earlier poems, which tended to force the point a bit too stridently, Borges focused mostly on his love for his native Buenos Aires. But in his latter works, after his eyesight had dimmed to near nothing, there is a vulnerability in his story-poems.

In the two poetry collections that I read for today's post, El Oro de los Tigres and La Rosa Profunda, Borges continues some of the explorations that he had begun in Elogio de la sombra (In Praise of Darkness). There are poems of famous historical figures, such as Hengist, sometimes at their gravesites or in reference to a deed that barely managed to live on after the person had died. There is more of the wistfulness that I had noted in earlier collections, and even a bit of sadness and regret. One of my favorite Borges poems is found in La Rosa Profunda, called "El Suicida." It is an interesting look at the thoughts of an imagined suicide:

No star will remain in the nightNight will not remainI will die and with me the sumof the intolerable universe.I will erase the pyramids, medals,continents, and faces.I will erase the past's accumulation.History I will make dust, dust to dust.I am looking at the last west wind.I hear the last bird.I leave nothing for anyone.

Ever since I first read this poem back in 2007, it has haunted me. It is perhaps the most downbeat and maybe even nihilistic of Borges' writings. There are no clever references to philosophies of the end or allusions to the entanglements of time, place, and soul. No, this reads as a poem of anger, of frustration, of a desire to say "Fuck this shit" and then going on to do just that. And yet there seems to be a bit more about it as well, something that speaks to my own occasional doubts, angers, and frustrations, to that periodic desire to just destroy all and to wander off, angry and frustrated at the totality of life and wishing for it to cease, at least for a moment, until things change. This is perhaps the poem that reveals just how vulnerable Borges was on occasion and for that reason, poems such as "El Suicidio" have made his early-to-mid 1970s poetry collections cherished reads for me over the past three years.